


Double Dutch

by remembertowrite



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Demonic Possession, During Canon, Gen, Horror, Multiple Personalities, Psychological Trauma, Unsoundiversary 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:01:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23782033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite
Summary: The Other had been positively ecstatic. It drummed at the edges of his skull with glee, called him an artist. It took away his voice and told him he only needed to speak with the exquisite violence he could wrought with his hands.Or: Simon's 18-year relationship with the demon squatting in his mind.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Double Dutch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stonefreed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stonefreed/gifts).



> Happy Unsoundiversary, stonefreed! This fanfic is part 3 of a Simon Reese-focused gift for the 2020 Unsoundiversary fanworks exchange.
> 
> You can also check out the related [aesthetic](https://404-brainnotfound.tumblr.com/post/616121118038835200/simon-reese-the-black-tapes-podcast-you-see) I used as inspiration and the [playlist](https://404-brainnotfound.tumblr.com/post/616139491790520320/snakes-in-the-grass-a-simon-reese-fan-mix) I listened to while writing this.
> 
> Many thanks to Levana/rubylevanah for beta reading.

It happened when he was so young that it’s hard to remember the distinct _before_ and _after_ of a traumatic event like he’s heard other patients describe. His doctor marks him by one moment, a singular scorched trauma of murderous overkill branded onto his mind, but it’s not that simple. Nothing ever is.

He supposes it started gradually, or maybe there was never a _before_. It’s always been there: sweet serpentine nothings hissed at him in his crib by his cultish CPA mother; shoddy etchings carved into the same hardwood that his father punished him for scratching once; and the Other, always the Other, the one his family welcomed like a long lost relative into their home.

His parents had stared at him like he was a holy thing. Well, not at him. At what he held. The Other, his persistent shadow. Once he had asked his mother, when he was very young, why she addressed him as her lord. The neighbor kids’ mom called her children “brats” and “accidents.” He hadn’t been sure why, but he could hear her squabbles with her husband late at night. While nestled in his twin bed, it had been like he was there also in the neighbors’ house, jealously observing like a ghost longing for a normalcy it never knew.

He was six and eating his favorite, all mashed potatoes, no green beans because they were icky. The next night, mac and cheese with hot dogs. Anything he wanted, his parents indulged. They looked lovingly upon him, but they never saw him.

The Other liked mashed potatoes and mac and cheese too. The Other was in him and outside of him and all of him and none of him.

The lessons started when he was seven. Homeschooled, naturally, his father told him; and he didn’t know any better that while he studied complex mathematics and ancient Sumerian, his peers studied multiplication tables and _Charlotte’s Web_. His father called him bright, and he beamed with pride, and the Other was proud of him too. It felt good to be told he was special.

(But he knew better, for while he pretended to sleep, his mother smeared blood of a sacrificed thing around his bedside. He was ten when he finally understood the blood wasn’t animal.)

It was easy to delight the Other. He made it cherished, comfortable, coddled. He walled off a secret part of his mind, burying his silly fears six feet deep, and used it as a strength to viciously bend the Other to his will. But the Other was easy to persuade. It liked violence and lusted for blood. It praised him for the delicious abstract painting he’d splattered across the white bedsheets and the headboard and the walls and the stained carpet and the popcorn ceiling and their horror-struck faces.

They had it coming.

The Other had been positively ecstatic. It drummed at the edges of his skull with glee, called him an artist. It took away his voice and told him he only needed to speak with the exquisite violence he could wrought with his hands.

It felt good to be seen. To be loved wholly and thoroughly without deceit.

During the time in lockup, for a while he wasn’t sure who bent whose will to whose. They chased each other like an ouroboros eating its own tail.

He held fast to the private corner of his mind, to take control when he needed. He kept his secrets. He gained his voice back, eventually. But the darkness was in him like a virus. The insane want to impress the Other.

He wasn’t sure whose pain he felt when the prayers from down the hall clapped like thunder rattling around in his head. But grasping his hands around Trevor’s windpipe filled his mouth with the taste of copper and salt and a giddiness that might’ve been his or not. Didn’t really matter.

Trevor had it coming.

(He’d warned him, after all.)

Then the journalist had come. Alex. And with her, Strand.

He’d felt it as soon as Strand entered the hospital parking lot. The brilliant burning _something_ raging in the cold prison of Strand’s disbelief. Lurking in Strand’s shadow, in the dark corners of the room, in the hardened lines of the older man’s face. A horrible awesome mythical thing sealed shut by Strand’s simple conviction. Living on only as a roach clinging to life, cowering behind the kitchen trash can.

Subdued, unfortunately. Power like that could be useful, and had been useful to Strand, but only the once. If controlled appropriately, the power could be deployed for protection. To balance out the evil introduced in the world. To inflict the natural fate on those who had it coming.

Alex, though. She saw him in a way Strand, Barnes, his parents, Trevor, no one had. She _saw_ him, and he knew it was meant to be. An instrument of protection. He would play her like the fiddler from Georgia played in that one song his father used to hum as he had thumbed through books on sacred geometry.

He tried his best to protect her, really. He loved her, in his own way. The Other loved her in its own way as well. The Other let him shield her as long as it was able to feed off her lovely terror. He spoke in riddles as his father had because it fostered chaos within her. He was saving her, and torturing her. Smoke and mirrors, he told her. It’s more complicated than you could understand, he told her.

He warded away the shadows that lived in her mind but fed off her insomnia. He offered warnings but let her play the five movements of the apocalyptic symphony, because he knew Alex was like him. She was smitten with the darkness in the same way he was.

It was his love for Alex that finally provided enough motivation to leave the hospital. He had to protect her from the dark world she had entered, of children offered up as sacrifices, as vessels. He heard her horror and the cries of the marked and it was enough. It was enough.

He meant to strangle the Other into submission but there was no need, really, because the Other encouraged his brutality, lauded his performance of mass suicide.

The Brothers of the Mount had it coming, he told her.

He knew she would sleep better at night because of it. He fed her information on Warren’s cursed machine because he knew she wanted to see it for herself, to physically touch the evidence of the evil in the world. He wanted to grant her wish, because he himself knew how good it felt to be loved in the all consuming way only the Other could.

She didn’t see it yet, but he knew she would. Eventually. She would long for the balance in herself and the world in the way he had achieved it.

It’s a curse, it’s a virus, he tells her. The end is not coming with a bang, but within each of us, he tells her.

Because, when he finally looks at himself in the mirror, he sees himself. He’s not in two places at once.

He looks in the mirror and sees the Other.


End file.
